Good to Us Chillun

Abstract

This chapter focuses on ex-slaves’ positive and negative assessments of their free fathers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African American communities celebrated caretaking fathers who invested emotionally, provided materially, and made it possible for their children to gain an education. They criticized neglectful, abusive men. The records of formerly enslaved people speak to the importance of caretaking and an ideal of paternal duty that prioritized moral masculinity and selfless, family-centered leadership. Freedmen’s efforts to parent in the post-Civil War period have remained largely invisible. Because successful Black men became targets of violence, few openly displayed their caretaking.